Vegetative Powers

The Roots of Life in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Natural Philosophy

Fabrizio Baldassarri, Andreas Blank

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783030697082
• eBook ISBN: 9783030697099
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

The volume analyzes the natural philosophical accounts and debates concerning the vegetative powers, namely nutrition, growth, and reproduction. While principally focusing on the early modern approaches to the lower functions of the soul, readers will discover the roots of these approaches back to the Ancient times, as the volume highlights the role of three strands that help shape the study of life in the Medieval and early modern natural philosophies. From late antiquity to the early modern period, the vegetative soul and its cognate concepts have played a substantial role in specifying life, living functions, and living bodies, sometimes blurring the line between living and non-living nature, and, at other moments, resulting in a strong restriction of life to a mechanical system of operations and powers. Unearthing the history of the vegetative soul as a shrub of interconnected concepts, the 24 contributions of the volume fill a crucial gap in scholarship, ultimately outlining the importance of vegetal processes of incessant proliferation, generation, and organic growth as the roots of life in natural philosophical interpretations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Missing a Soul That Endows Bodies with Life: An Introduction
• 2. Soul, Parts of the Soul, and the Definition of the Vegetative Capacity in Aristotle’s De anima
• 3. Embodied Intelligent (?) Souls: Plants in Plato’s Timaeus
• 4. The Vegetative Soul in Galen
• 5. Avicenna on Vegetative Faculties and the Life of Plants
• 6. Can Plants Desire? Aspects of the Debate on desiderium naturale
• 7. Disclosing the Hidden Life of Plants. Theories of the Vegetative Soul in Albert the Great’s De vegetabilibus et plantis
• 8. On the Natural Generation of Human Beings: The Vegetative Power in a Thought Experiment by Some Masters of Arts (1250-c. 1268)
• 9. Thomas Aquinas on the Vegetative Soul
• 10. The Vegetative Powers of Human Beings: Late Medieval Metaphysical Worries
• 11. The Jesuit Cultivation of Vegetative Souls: Leonard Lessius (1554–1623) on a Sober Diet
• 12. Nicolaus Taurellus on Vegetative Powers and the Question of Substance Monism
• 13. Vegetal Analogy in Early Modern Medicine: Generation as Plant Cutting in Sennert’s Early Treatises (1611–1619)
• 14. Vegetative and Sensitive Functions of the Soul in Descartes’s Meditations
• 15. Failures of Mechanization: Vegetative Powers and the Early Cartesians, Regius, La Forge, and Schuyl
• 16. Marin Cureau de la Chambre on the Vegetative Powers
• 17. Re-inventing the Vegetable Soul? More’s Spirit of Nature and Cudworth’s Plastic Nature Reconsidered
• 18. Margaret Cavendish and Vegetable Life
• 19. Plantanimal Imagination: Life and Perception in Early Modern Discussions of Vegetative Power
• 20. “Vegetative Epistemology”: Francis Glisson on the Self-Referential Nature of Life
• 21. Life in the Dark: Corals, Sponges, and Gravitation in Late Seventeenth Natural Philosophy
• 22. Vegetable Life: Applications, Implications, and Transformations of a Classical Concept (1500–1700)
• 23. The Notion of Vegetative Soul in the Leibniz-Stahl Controversy
• 24. Vegetation and Life from Wolff to Hanov
• 25. Bichatʼs Two Lives